


a gentle sound, the rolling in the graves

by LittleLostStar



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (It's Always Sunny in Philedelphia theme plays) "Star Finally Goes Full Angst on the Reylo Fandom", Ben is a tree, Dark Rey (Star Wars), F/M, Lots of Angst Though, No Smut, Not A Happy Ending, Rey Needs A Hug, The Giving Tree if it was located in the woods just outside of the walled city of Loudon, does it count as major character death if your character is a tree?, inspired by hozier lyrics, introspective tree feelings, maybe next time, no betas we die like men, rey needs revenge, some burning at the stake is involved, there's a weird Joan of Arc revenge plot thing happening just offscreen don't worry about it, treelo AU, written and yeeted onto AO3 in the space of one night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:49:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27055957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleLostStar/pseuds/LittleLostStar
Summary: A tree has never fallen in love, but Ben thinks it might feel like falling in real life: the lurch, the sudden sway, the inevitable combination of dread and joy as one life falls away and another cobbles itself together from the ashes and dust.~Ben was born a blackthorn tree, and he wants to be felled by Rey. That's just about it.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 11
Kudos: 23





	a gentle sound, the rolling in the graves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [QueenOfCarrotFlowers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfCarrotFlowers/gifts).



> Rare is the occasion that I will yeet something onto AO3 so quickly and without a hundred million fussy revisions, but hozier-inspired treelo was apparently one of those occasions. ANYWAY ENJOY

Ben has been growing for a very long time. He’s seen so little.

Life is a throng, a constant wash of sensation: the worms entwined around his roots, the beetles crawling up his trunk, the parasite chewing at the tops of his leaf cover and dimming his sight. The sun used to shine so brightly, when Ben was young; he had room, back then. He could see the sky, and it seemed absolutely limitless.

He shudders through each thunderstorm, sheds limbs with a fierce _crack_ , loses days and weeks and months to the deepness called _winter_.

But _winter_ is when she comes to him.

Her footfalls are a profoundly alien notion, the colours and textures of her skin almost impossibly foreign. Ben hardly has time to conceive of her shape before she falls abruptly, landing at the base of his trunk with a heavy thud and going very still.

It takes time to shake the sleep from his branches, but Ben has all the time in the world, and so he leans and stretches and microscopically comes to understand this new being lying prone at his roots. She’s still alive, exhaling warm breath that tickles him pleasantly; her forehead and mouth are crusted with blood, and she’s wearing silver armour that seems to dwarf her body.

Ben is not used to being awake in the winter, and the lull of sleep calls to him louder than his curiosity can bear; he falls back into hibernation, curling into the very deepest parts of himself to survive the cold. When he next blooms into the world, it’s spring; the girl is gone.

Spring is a busy time; lots of work to do to regain all the ground lost to the snapping cruelty of winter. Ben tries to focus on growing, pushing leaves to unfurl as he greedily seeks the sun—but he finds himself wondering about her. His roots have never held a memory before, but when he reaches deep down to the earth he finds the oldest parts of himself have been tainted with a bitter coppery tang. Surely she couldn’t have bled that much, to have soaked into his very roots. No human could survive that; she should still be here, a corpse returning slowly to the earth, to be consumed by all the creeping things that seek nourishment from every source and direction. But she’s gone, and there’s no way to know where or why.

As spring crawls to summer, Ben finds himself shrinking back from the sun; he withers ever so slightly, his energy irreversibly diverted to thoughts about the girl in silver. Ben either remembers or imagines the soft swell of her lip, the shining brown of her hair, the way she seemed to hum with quiet life pulsing beneath the surface of her skin. He wonders if she lived, if that energy continues to circulate just as surely as the fluid in his own roots. He dreams of lying down beside her, of finding the steady purchase of the forest floor and letting it all fall apart.

Time means nothing to a tree, so it’s both eternity and an instant before Ben sees her again.

She’s even more enthralling this second time; it’s summer, and Ben is at the height of his admittedly-less-impressive bloom; he’s even got a few sloes hanging within reach, though they’re not quite ripe yet.

The girl finds Ben again without hesitation, walking straight to the cleft between two roots and falling to her knees. Ben watches as she begins to dig through the soil at the base of his trunk, first with her knife and then with her bare hands, scrabbling like a feral thing. She pulls something shrivelled from the ground—a bag, no larger than her palm. The girl shrieks as she holds it overhead, triumphant and furious.

“I’ll show you a _witch_ , Plutt,” she hisses, clutching the bag close to her chest like something precious. “I’ll make you _bleed_.”

And then, impossibly, the girl reaches out and pats Ben’s trunk affectionately.

“Thanks for looking after this for me,” she says. “Sorry about the wait.”

 _What did you do?_ Ben has never thought to speak, so he just rustles his leaves, and she smirks to herself.

“Maybe I am going mad,” she sighs. “Talking to a bloody tree.”

There’s a strange sensation at the heart of Ben’s trunk and he realizes it’s something called _surprise_. Can she hear him? Can she understand?

The girl has opened the bag, spilling something dark and shimmering into her hand. The wind suddenly picks up, swirling around her, picking up twigs and leaves from the detritus all around them. There’s a sound that isn’t quite a sound, and then Ben is silently screaming as a dark new energy reaches down from the sky and races through his roots, into the ground and up through her hands. For a moment they are connected; for a moment Ben is suspended between the girl and this terrifying non-sun _thing_ she’s summoned, something dark and light at the same time.

Ben is abruptly silenced as the girl opens her mouth and _shrieks_ , an unholy sound that seems to pierce the sky itself. In that moment he knows everything and nothing of what it means to be human. The shock of it burns through his roots, racing up his truck and out to every branch and twig, until he sags, limp and hollow and dry. His leaves shrivel into dust in seconds, dissolving to nothing and raining all around her in a grey cloud; his branches snap and twist in unexpected agony, and Ben reaches for a word and comes up with _love._

Her name is Rey, and now he knows everything about her; he’s felt her terror, her misery, her despair, her fury. Ben is made of cellulose, his cells rigid and unyielding; but he’s felt the rush of red blood pumping through her heart now, and he’s scrambling and failing to remember exactly what he used to be. It doesn’t matter anymore.

Rey. _Rey_. Ben feels her name crawl into every nook and cranny, and he feels so full with love that he scarcely notices the axe in her hand.

The first cut is agony, true pain in a way that overtakes every other sensation, plunging him into the most profound and lonely darkness imaginable. But Ben sighs, his dead branches clattering together in a skeletal ode to his oblivion. The second cut overtakes the first, the axe cutting deeper, but Ben doesn’t care. She wants this; he will give it to her. That’s what love is.

Cutting him down takes a long time, and time suddenly means everything to Ben. He doesn’t resist her; he wouldn’t even if he could. But he knows deep down that whatever it is she’s done to him has destroyed his capacity to grow; he’ll never reach towards the sun again. The sun is shaped like a girl, her hands shaking with the fury that fuelled her back into the crook of his roots, and Ben will bask in the warmth of her arms for as long as she’ll have him.

A tree has never fallen in love, but Ben thinks it might feel like falling in real life: the lurch, the sudden sway, the inevitable combination of dread and joy as one life falls away and another cobbles itself together from the ashes and dust. As Rey drags his body through the woods, Ben listens to the way he rustles against the ground and imagines lifting her up to the tallest heights of the world, to the spots where the tiny sparrows used to nest in the spring.

Rey has been fighting for so long, and she’s given up everything of herself to get her revenge. Ben knows this because he knows everything, because she stole the life from him and somehow he survived. That’s what love is.

When she cuts him up for the pyre, Ben sings in silence, so he doesn’t end up screaming again. It’s curious, to be in multiple pieces, but he can get used to it. He can get used to anything; he can grow, change, adapt.

When she has the men hoisted up on stakes, their toes just barely scrabbling against the top of his branches, Ben beams like the sun, imagining or remembering the way it made him feel in the lazy summer afternoons. The warmth of memory masks the heat of the flames at first, and it’s not until the men begin to scream that Ben realizes what she’s done.

The fire takes hold, racing through the tiny twisting channels that once carried his own lifeblood, and Ben sings his love in the crackle and hiss as the tongues of flame rise to the sky. In the end, the men who have sought to destroy her transform into anguished wailing things, screaming to their last breath; he burns them happily, letting the fire consume every part of him as their bones crack into shards that gather beneath his still-glowing embers.

Through the haze, Ben can see her: the fire casts her skin in a warm golden hue, and her eyes glitter with frenzied satisfaction. Rey’s chest rises and falls as she breathes in the anguished howls for mercy and the acrid sting of the smoke; she is happy, finally, after far too many years curled up in the dark and alone.

 _It’s like summer,_ Ben thinks, as agony transforms to ecstasy and he begins to crumble to ash. _It’s just like summer—_

~

_If I was born as a blackthorn tree  
_ _I'd wanna be felled by you  
_ _Held by you  
_ _Fuel the pyre of your enemies  
_ _Ain't it warming you, the world gone up in flames?  
_ _Ain't it the life you, your lighting of the blaze?_  
_Ain't it a waste they'd watch the throwing of the shade?_  


\- Hozier

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/littlestarlost)! Come say hi!


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